THIS IS MESSY, WE'RE NOT SORRY: Elegant Mire with Carrie Lorig, v. 3

Cassandra:  so i have the fruit tree!

Carrie:  and the ocean skirting it!

Cassandra:  or, there will be something for me at the table

Carrie:  yeah totally

i'm also trying to think that way

something will present itself otherwise

past devastation

or whatever it will feel like if i have no offers

Cassandra:  it's like a blank hole flirting with you

Carrie:  lol yes

a cold porch

Cassandra:  haha, yes

Carrie:  either way i hear Alice Notley saying she will destroy anyone who keeps her from writing poems

Cassandra:  and no one is stopping that

we continuez regardless of the academy

Carrie: yes / u are always good at reminding me that i do know that energy

lol i'm a teacher's pet / a teacher’s floral nightmare until death on some level

“After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears” –“The Only Possible Relationship to the University Today is a Criminal One,” —The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten.

Cassandra:  and it pumps through joyfully!

pulp vs throne is the testament of suction

Carrie: vigorous collapse / like yrs is vigorous dissolution

dude i got the chillz this morning

reading this line again in yr book

“this is a dedication to a lack of devotion”

i stole that from you!

and forgot i did it!

(THE JEWEL THIEF SINGS SYLVAN ESSO / JULIO CORTAZAR):

“…entering into words, out of a vomit of stars or eels; whatever’s said, the slow curve of the marble instrument or the boiling black nocturnal ribbon assaulting the estuaries, and not just for being said, this is that flows or converges or seeks…Artistotelian Dog, let the duality that sharpens your fangs somehow know your superfluity when another sluice begins to open in marble and in fish, when Jai Singh with a crystal between his fingers is that fisherman extracting from his net, with a shudder of teeth and fury, an eel that is a star that is an eel that is a star that is an eel.”—Julio Cortázar, From the Observatory

Cassandra: we owe each other the most irreverent stealing

Carrie:  it's real. spectacular / it is truly unconscious in the most velvet sense for me

(N is texting A in Brooklyn right now about how we still use Tupperware we left at each other’s houses while happening / to visit. “It’s our shared spaces,” says N to me.)

Cassandra: "Fear is the beginning / of devotion / of a dedication. It’s the beginning of a need and a desire to be devoted. A need and a desire that emerges / becomes apparent / becomes an apparition”

Carrie: i was writing to you from the blooming in the ground

Cassandra:  yes! which is the best theft since you continue where i couldn't

i think at this moment i was hit by a pooling

Carrie:  *nods* and i think of you starting where i can't. i work towards the unapology / the borderless / or react towards finding it / insisting on it. you have it immediate and forested.

pooling / pool is one of my favorite words because its material interior is inherently built into the word!

Cassandra:  or, i play the game of immediacy, i play opossum until i'm actually dead. the pool is collective/collecting

Carrie: pulsation beacon / rawness

Cassandra: a voided space trying to fin the ends of itself through excess

*find

Carrie: i like fin, too. swimming wounds!

Cassandra: Fin/swim; fin/end

The fish end. The fish/pool/corpse, these are all in the ecology of violence resonating, but not waves, they are sonic orca vibrations.

“ ‘What does a corpse mean where you are?’

asks B in a letter. I wonder what corpses mean in Florida?

Have you ever seen a corpse.

Whatever it is, they are, it's also burned?” The Pulp Vs. The Thrones pg. 82

Or when you quote Bhanu Kapil, "‘...ultra violent in a good way. The violence of stepping out of one life and into another, with the freedom to mourn, love, and create works of art that nobody can ‘resist’ "

Carrie: B (who is sometimes a woman I write to and sometimes a man I write to) asked me if I had any corpses in any of my poems

the word

or that's what I assumed he / she meant

but I didn't!

which surprised me but then maybe not

because the dead body seems more like suspension to me

?

or dying

is an activity

rather than the way a body lies

down

Cassandra: yes

Carrie: radical continuation despite

which also seems at the heart of your text

Cassandra: there is violence in leaving the pool

Carrie: the suicide note that questions what destroying is

*nods*

the air "hits" you

Cassandra: yes, because we don't know what violence wants from us, but we believe we know what death wants with us

Carrie:  "To those in the residual trenches

and weight and wet and lost.

The non-place the canvas for reality, its blankness the scene for possibility"

*nods* exactly.

Cassandra: which is also the pool

Carrie: and the suction

i think i'm dumb enough to believe violence can have a part in teaching me how to be loving / or return with loving

or my experience in and around it

Cassandra: I have been thinking of this question in regards to your/our work. I don't even know if we get the luxury of believing in any register of life or political imaginary not propelled by violence.

Carrie: i think you're right

but i think there's a difference between replicating it in exactness

and turning it into a material or a source or hm

i'm not sure if those are the right words

Cassandra: It is in/through/around us always when in yr TPVTT "‘If I hear the word privilege one more time, I’m going to shoot myself in the head,’ says the Male Professor."

Carrie: when i heard that somehow i knew i was already beyond what he could do to me

Cassandra: exactly

Carrie: i had already died / lived

dancing shaman corpse

him saying that is exactly like itsme12969 asking what anastasiasteele3577 needs over and over in KILL MANUAL

i wasn't even there

just a board to throw knives at

lol

practice!

Cassandra: right, and in academia men can pretend they care even less, or they don’t have to pretend at all. i worry and wonder through all the places where women lie more prostate.

Carrie: *nods* me too. i think that landscape flickers and is erractic.

“she wasn’t a tree. But what is a tree.

The mutability of the banished woman.

The mutability of the banished woman.”

—“Black Walnut,” And I Shall Again Be Virtuous, Natalie Eilbert

Cassandra: I used to think choosing the space for violence negotiated the power in the process of de-subjectification. Now I feel less sure, or realize how mobile and wandering the concept of agency is, or how I don't want to take money from corporate lawyers at BP (in the intimate/public labor performed). There is nothing you can do to laminate yourself indefinitely to self-determination, walking around a room saying, “I’M IN CONTROL!”

Carrie: mmhmm / i'm trying to process through that‬ / experiencing violence / fields of violence doesn’t prepare me to see / hear / feel how another experienced violence / how that registers and grows its oil slick that the birds and the clover die in / the meridian that haunts Celan (all the BP lawyers want us to see violence done to us as the “same,” right?) / what emerges from that impossibility but the murmur / the swarm (inside)? “She allows others. In place of her. Admits others to make full. Make swarm. All barren cavities to make swollen. The others each occupying her. Tumorous layers, expel all excesses until in all cavities she is flesh”—“Diseuse,” Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha ‬

Cassandra: "Does it understand resistance / or is it a moving hole / of /

bones and ambition / lying so Still / or absorbent?

Mostly what I mean by Lying Down is that /

The weight of things is actually a greatness"

Carrie: Maybe it has something to do with....depending on poetry to create inseparability

between poetry and anything else

instead of choosing / there's just refusal?

Cassandra: But what you say is so crucial, "There’s a body. Unquotable / Remarkable.

It’s unquotable / so instead, it’s remarkable.

Does it understand resistance."

Carrie: The kind of writing or body or writingbody or bodywriting that can't be sussed out

here aren't parts

u can shed sun or shit on

there's just radiation

Cassandra: or the resistance is built through its ambitions

Carrie: "outside the imaginable realm of what could be possible or desirable"

"desirable or possible"

Carrie: fucking the doorknob is just like Bhanu's new book not giving us all that it is / glimpse

Cassandra: to make the force of the unbearable integral to yr longing

in all its glorious antithesis

Carrie: yes / to fail to recognize it as unbearable or even as longing

sometimes

more like movement

which is not always even moving

but is certainly circulating

"one's limits aren't limits" as you say in KILL MANUAL.

Carrie: lol i can't believe ppl call books books sometimes!

"blackened charred in a ruined flesh" KILL MANUAL / the charnal ground

where the ugly isn't ugly it's just unfathomable

and that word unfathomable doesn't even mean what it usually means in your book / our book

i can still see

white and gold / blue and black

Cassandra: i think of this poem all the time, but only in their form of recitation. http://jacket2.org/commentary/recovering-memorial-day

"we speak all the time in the present tense in the speed of light," "let it down, let it down on me"

seeing what a book is/wasn't. the way a body lies down

Carrie: exactly i'm never scared...i'm just saturating

Cassandra: the unfathomable is a joyful possibility, it is the edge of reason "ghost typewriter, ghost lover, roasted ghost”

Carrie: ghostflower!

where catharsis' priest robe gets replaced by a river!

Carrie: "converted figured"

Cassandra:  i wonder with your work how you find the limit of saturation, so everything is not lost in the char

Carrie:  you mean how i form a sentence?

i don't think there is a limit because i don't process saturation as overwhelming tho at times it does....cause me to overflow?

Cassandra: on the molecular level, yes. but the sentence is only one structure

Carrie: as far as things getting lost there's repetition?

and building

building until there's this emerging, decorous petal / pattern

and then the saturation is still itself but also part of me and able to move beyond me

between us

the pause between the breath where the body is elongated impossibly but not stranded / a strand of carved sap glistening

i don't know if that makes sense!

Cassandra: so there are noisewords, but it has to move beyond

they cannot be just clogging

Carrie: it all means / has particular-ness to me

within either a moment or a movement

noisewords are never in danger of being lost?

tho it is okay if they sink below me

noisewords ‬are a different approach to intelligence or thinking to me. an urgency / in the ceremony of approach / the raw wound or the gate sparkling impossibly!

Cassandra: for me, noisewords are the space in-between

or they have a de-stabilizing effect

Carrie: it's how saturation seems incredibly various in your work i think

Cassandra: they are the voice of psychosis, desire, the break in the tongue

Carrie: *nods* in the unexpected reaction on the part of the female that is always both an aggression and an incredible permeability in your text.

like the voice in kill manual has such ever changing ideas around PREFERENCE

Cassandra: and -ference

Carrie:  yes! which to me is so radical

sneaking martinis into the brute rink!

"i'm the only woman of my dreams"

what that is surrounded by / that particular poem "LET US PUT ON AN ARMOR OF LIGHT " is all –ference

intoxication

Cassandra: the hard work of getting over/into oneself

Carrie: Blonde on Blonde

Cassandra: "IT WAS SO HOT / AND IT WAS SO HUMAN.” The Pulp Vs. The Throne, pg. 54

Carrie: "THE BODY IS THE ONLY OBJECT IN THE WORLD AND IT SWAYS FRAIL IN A BETTER IMAGE"

is sometimes what i think about my inability to think of any line as a throwaway or a synthetic conduit.

is it is joke if its secretly kind and thick

is sometimes what i think about my inability to think of any line as a throwaway or a synthetic conduit.

"i am a devastation warmed wrong"

Cassandra: “What are blocks and bricks and bubbles?

What is nonbearable?

When does the world know?” The Pulp Vs. The Throne, pg. 37

Carrie: what if any regret i feel doesn't make me feel penance / regression

"DIRTY SPRITE FOREVER"

selfishly addicted to regeneration that doesn't mean growing a recognizable limb in its place

Carrie: "ALL I PRODUCE IN HEAVEN AND EARTH"

 

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CARRIE LORIG is the author of the chapbooks NODS. (Magic Helicopter Press), Being Stone (Big Lucks), and Reading as a Wildflower Activist / Part 1(forthcoming from H_NGM_N). She has also written several collaborative chapbooks, including Labor Day (Forklift Books) with Nick Sturm and rootpoems (Radioactive Moat) with Sara Woods. A full length book, The Pulp vs. The Throne (Artifice Books), will be out in July 2015.